Mike wrote:
Great. thanks for detailed explanation. But that doesn't happen
on z/VM or VM/ESA,
I would venture a guess the reason is likely because IBM realized it wasn't actually accomplishing anything and so decided to change it.
and why do you see 4 more bytes after 0xff, but before form feed?
I don't know. None of us are seeing that. What version of Hercules are you using, and does your Hercules configuration file contain a CODEPAGE statement and does the device statement for your printer have the "crlf" or any other options specified?
It is not that you just see 0xff and form feed, but two empty lines and
then form feed.
That's expected! VM/370, as explained and shown in a previous post, is writing 0xff to the printer TWICE!
And each one will appear as a separate line whenever you view the file with a program that doesn't understand what it's looking at (because Hercules writes out either a CR or CRLF after each 0xff since it's interpreting the 0xff as print line data).
So, if you were to follow the instructions in the output
file, you would have one empty page with that strange
character printed out, followed by the rest of the output.
Correct!
Fish, how is your HercPrt handling this?
Using my HercPrt requires that your printer device statement NOT specify the "crlf" option. This ensures that lines that are printed "without spacing" are followed by Hercules with just a single CR (carriage return) character and normal (write then space) print lines are followed by one or more LF (line feed) characters. Then it's just a matter of properly dealing with the CRs and LFs that are received.
Lines are buffered and not written out until they need to be. CRs cause another "line" to be buffered in memory, and when it's eventually forced out, the buffered "lines" (overlays, however many there may be) are each printed individually, thereby allowing overstriking (overlaying) to occur (or bolding if the same character is printed multiple times or underlining if overlaid with an underline character, etc).
Remember, with HercPrt, this is being written to a PDF file, not to a text file, so displaying multiple characters on top of one another (overstriking) is a "simple" matter of writing the proper PDF code to "display this character at this position" multiple times, each time for a different character (but at the same position on the page). Underlines are dealt with the same way.
Next question would be how to add end banner in DMKBOX, or in the spooler?
I have no idea. Ask someone else.
--
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
Software Development Laboratories
mail: fish@...
